and pluck til time and times are done
the silver apples of the moon
the golden apples of the sun
the silver apples of the moon
the golden apples of the sun
I
t doesn’t feel unnatural to Aster, this wandering. Maybe it is because she was born on the island, when time hung suspended and there were no castles, no courts, nothing but her family and the magic that hung in the air thick as a fog. Maybe it is because her parents were wanderers, too, of worlds and time and lives.
Today, she and Leonidas walk beneath thick and whispering leaves, a canopy that lets only small shafts of light drift through. Roots rise in knotted tangles and sluggish water reflects what pieces of the sky it can. But it is not quiet, this strange slow place: mosquitos hum and cicadas buzz like strange music, and birds call to one another and make small quick darting paths through the trees.
Sometimes Leonidas leads, and sometimes Aster, and their cheetah cubs go with them. Occasionally there are shouts of Look or a murmured this way as they navigate the maze of water and trees. Teak rides the filly’s narrow dappled back, unimpressed with the damp, light as a bit of dandelion gone to seed.
They are playing - being noisy, being children - when one of them first sees the house.
It is a marvelous thing, all windows and wood, overhung with vines and crooked as the path they’d taken. At once Aster is sure that it is full of secret things, of knowledge, and together like siblings in a fairytale they come closer and closer. When Aster first hears the music of the wind chimes, she falls still, cocking her head to listen, as Teak squirms on her back and makes a small sound of wariness.
She turns her head sharply when the figure rushes out the doorway, joined by a crow. Aster stays close to her brother, but keeps her bright golden eyes on the woman, curious but not matching her grin (she is not a grinning sort of girl, and her smiles are as rare as eclipses, except for Leonidas). On her back, Teak flexes his small claws and her skin twitches beneath the prick of them.
Aster looks from the woman (pretty, with her silver eyes and her skin like a dark river-stone, and fascinating, with her bird and her necklace of skulls and her house that makes questions spring up like white-capped waves in the girl’s mind) to her brother and back again.
“Are you a witch?” she asks, and it is clear she hopes the answer is yes.
@Leonidas @Corrdelia <3 oy I am terrible at children
